This chapter is from the book

Understand the difference between the administrator and visitor areas of your Drupal site.

Understand the visitor area of your Drupal site.

Understand the administrator area of your Drupal site.

Make your first Drupal site changes.

The Administration Menu Explained

At the end of Chapter 3, “Drupal Installations Explained,” you installed your new Drupal site and logged in. Congratulations! You’re now ready to explore your Drupal site.

Across the top of the site, you now see a horizontal, black administration menu, as shown in Figure 4.1. This menu is the most important part of your site. Almost everything you want to change and modify on your site can be accessed from here.

The links in this menu are organized according to how often they’re used.

On the left side of your menu, you can see a Home icon, plus a Dashboard and Content link. These are three of the links you click most often.

On the right side of your menu, you can see Configuration, Reports, and Help links. Configuration and Reports are links that are used less frequently. These contain settings and maintenance functions. The Help link contains documentation.

You can also customize this screen to show the information that you want. To do so, follow these steps:

Click the Customize dashboard link that you see in the top-left corner of Figure 4.5. You now see a screen, as shown in Figure 4.6. There are two more boxes available: Recent Comments and Who’s Online.

Content

This screen gives you a list of all the content that has been added to your site. At the moment, that’s a grand total of zero content items. However, if you have a lot of content, you can use the filters at the top of the page to find content easily. Figure 4.10 shows how you can search by the status of the content.

You can also search for content of a particular type, as shown in Figure 4.11. Chapter 5, “Drupal Content Explained,” explains the difference between an Article and a Basic page. In Chapter 5 you also see how to create more types of content.

The Find content link takes you back to the Content screen you have been looking at already.

The Add Content link is the most important link in the entire site. After all, you are using a Content Management System (CMS). Everything you do with Drupal in this book is designed to help you add content to your website.

Click Add Content, and you see a screen like Figure 4.17. As mentioned earlier, Drupal provides two types of content: Article and Basic page.

Underneath the two content types, you see a brief explanation of what their purposes are. The Article is described as being for time-sensitive content such as news, press releases, or blog posts. The Basic page is described as being for your static content, such as an About Us page.

The next chapter creates several examples so that you can understand the difference between these two.

Structure

The short explanation of this Structure screen is that it contains the main fundamental building blocks of your site.

The long explanation of this Structure screen will take several chapters. You explore blocks in Chapter 10, “Drupal Blocks Explained,” Content types in Chapter 5, “Drupal Content Explained”, menus in Chapter 8, “Drupal Menus Explained,” and taxonomy in Chapter 6, “Drupal Fields Explained.” In this book, you also add several links to this page.

For now, notice that, as with the Add content screen, there are short explanations under each link:

Blocks: Configure what content appears in your site’s sidebars and other regions.

Finally, there is a top-right tab called Permissions. Chapter 13, “Drupal Users Explained,” goes into that area and shows you how to control user permissions on your site.

Modules

Click the Modules link in the administration menu. You can now see the screen shown in Figure 4.23. This area contains all the features on your Drupal site. Each module has a description beside it showing what it does.

This list is sorted alphabetically at the moment, so it starts with Aggregator and ends with User. Your version of Drupal might have more modules than this lower down the page; however, the modules between Aggregator and User are the default modules shared by all Drupal sites.

You can add more modules via the Install New Module link in the top-left corner. You see how to do that in Chapter 6, “Drupal Fields Explained,” and then Chapter 7, “Drupal Modules Explained,” gives you even more details.

For now, take a look at one module in detail. The Comment module is shown in Figure 4.24. There are eight pieces of information or useful links:

Check box: Is this module enabled? If you don’t want anyone commenting on your site, you can uncheck this box and click Save Configuration at the bottom of the screen. Comments will be instantly turned off for your whole site.

Comment: The module’s name!

7.18: The module’s version number. This will increase while you use Drupal because new versions will be released with improvements and bug fixes. You see how to update to those new versions in Chapter 14, “Drupal Site Management Explained.”

Description: This explains what the module does. This explanation is fairly clear; although, not all descriptions will be so easy to understand.

Requires and Required By: This area tells you if the Comment module needs other modules to operate. This area also tells you if the Comment module is needed by other modules to function.

Help: If you are unsure how to use a module, click this link for a more detailed explanation.

Permissions: This takes you to the Permissions area you just saw on the People screen. It enables you to decide who uses this module.

Configure: If there are any settings for this module, you can find them by clicking this link.

Click List Links in the center of the next screen. You now see a screen, as shown in Figure 4.27. Notice that there are two links: Add Content and Find Content. These are the same two links that you can see in the gray area of your administration menu.

Reports

This area contains reports about the health of your site. Here, you can find out whether there are any problems with your site, whether your site needs updating, what people are searching for using your search box, and similar useful information. Chapter 14 explains more about this area.

Help

Click the Help link on the Administration menu. You can now see the screen shown in Figure 4.29.

This Help area is something that can become more useful as you become more experienced. When you first use Drupal, some of the terminology here may be confusing. However, by the end of this book, you will hopefully understand the large majority of these terms.

Hello

Click the Hello link on the Administration menu, as shown in Figure 4.32.

Click the Edit tab under your name, and you see the screen shown in Figure 4.34. From here you can edit your username and password. You can also change the email address that your site uses to send you notifications.